Infrared cameras capture thermal images of objects, such as boilers, electrical and mechanical machines, buildings and homes, etc., in order to identify the hot spots in the thermal scenes. Hot spots may indicate malfunctions in machineries or heat losses in buildings and homes. Generally, a camera operator surveys a thermal scene and may take pictures of a scene using an infrared sensor to provide temperature measurements and/or a CCD (charge-coupled device) or CMOS (complementary metal-oxide semiconductor) image sensor to provide a digital visual image of the scene. The camera may also measure other properties of the scene, such as humidity, speed of air flows, etc., and parametric information, such as date, time, GPS coordinates, emissivity value, and background temperature.
The camera operator typically would prepare a report for the customer who had ordered the thermal survey. The operator has to download the IR and visual images and other data to a computer, which must have special driver software and other specialized hardware and software to import the images and data to prepare a report to be presented to the customer. This process can be time consuming and the delivery to the customer is typically delayed. Furthermore, the delay may cause the operator to forget observations about the thermal scene and to omit them from the later-prepared report. The camera operator may carry a portable computer to the survey sites to prepare the report. However, this can be cumbersome and certain survey sites may be inhospitable to the operation of portable computing devices. Furthermore, the portable computer must be pre-loaded with the software specially designed for the particular IR camera being used for that survey.
Certain IR cameras, such as the T-Series IR cameras from FLIR Systems, Inc., on the market today have the capability to store voice comments from the camera operator and associate the voice comments with certain thermal images. The T-Series cameras can also store text comments input directly into the camera through a touch screen or from predetermined list of commonly used texts. The T-Series, particularly the T400 camera, also allows the operator to add free-hand sketches directly on the thermal or visual images and to store the sketches. Additionally, FLIR's i-Series IR cameras can display the thermal image and the visual image in “picture-in-picture” format. The i-Series can also display images as a thumbnail gallery, allowing the operator to view multiple images simultaneously or to conveniently view stored images. The other FLIR IR cameras also have similar capabilities discussed above.
There remains a need in the art and in the industry for a camera that can prepare a report to the customer on-board after a survey of a thermal scene.